Mapping Production and Perception in Regional Vowel Shifts: The Effects of Vowel Duration and Formant Trajectories

norms affect how speakers perceive input. More recently, in work related to the current project, vowel dynamics and regional dialect experience were found to influence vowel threshold decisions for high and mid front vowel classes. The current study expands on these findings to explore more deeply the link between perception and production and the role of socially-based variation. Based on multiregional, web-based vowel identification and discrimination experiments, our projects have so far looked at community norms in terms of regional dialect differences, not at the level of individual speakers ’ production systems. Expanding on earlier findings, the current project acoustically analyzes the vowel productions of a subset of the experiments ’ participants to map their productive and perceptual spaces for the high and mid front vowel classes, asking what kinds of links exist between speakers ’ actual speech production and perception (e.g., Frieda et al. 2000). Recent research has demonstrated the importance of considering vowel duration in understanding production differences (e.g., Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons 2007) and, in addition to examining formant values, we investigate at length the role of duration and durational norms across dialect regions in the perception of vowel quality